1. See for example K. Figlio, “Chlorosis and chronic disease in nineteenth-century Britain: The social constitution of somatic illness in a capitalist society,”Social History 3 (1978), 167–97; I.S.L. Loudon, “Chlorosis, anaemia and anorexia nervosa,”British Medical Journal 281 (1980), 1669–1675; J. Starobinski, “Chlorosis—the ‘green sickness’,”Psychological Medicine 11 (1981), 459–68; A. Clair Siddall, “Chlorosis: Etiology reconsidered,”Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56 (1982), 254–60; J. J. Brumberg, “Chlorotic girls, 1870–1920: A historical perspective on female adolescence,”Child Development 53 (1982), 1468–77; I. S. L. Loudon, “The diseases called chlorosis,”Psychological Medicine 14 (1984), 27–36.
2. Siddall, “Chlorosis,” 254.
3. Artistic and literary aspects are discussed by Loudon, “Chlorosis, anaemia and anorexia nervosa,” 1669; cf. R. E. McFarland, “The rhetoric of medicine: Lord Herbert's and Thomas Carew's poems of green-sickness,”Journal of the History of Medicine 30 (1975), 250–8. L. Dixon,Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Ithaca and London, 1995, reproduces a large number of images of sick maidens, mostly from seventeenth-century Holland, several of which are associated by title or by content with green sickness. However, the author chooses to merge green sickness, love sickness, hysteria, nymphomania and many other categories which sources contemporary with their alleged prevalence chose to distinguish. By glossing over attempts to separate them, and instead seeing them all as different labels for a single condition, “a mysterious universal ailment of many names that has afflicted women throughout history” (240), Dixon fails to understand the rich range of ways in which medicine has historically claimed to hold the keys to the health of women of all ages and social classes. Her book is also littered with a series of serious factual errors. A. Hansen, “Die Chlorose im Altertum,”Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 24 (1931), 175–84, discusses the absence of chlorosis not only from ancient medical literature, but also from ancient poetry and art, believing that anything adversely affecting the marriage prospects of young girls would have been the subject of “long and lively discussion” by their mothers and would thereby have entered non-medical literature (182). This may be somewhat fanciful, but the point remains that a full history of chlorosis would need to take account of changes in the visual representations of the condition. G. de Baillou,De virginum et mulierum morbis, Paris 1643, 58 describes the role of “ignorant and complaining mothers” who are shocked by the speed with which their afflicted daughters appear to be wasting away.
4. Luis Mercado,De mulierum affectionibus, Venice 1587, 215; cf. J. Varandal,De morbis et affectibus mulierum, Lyons 1619, preface, on the many pale and disfigured virgins of his own day as a result of cachexia, the “pale colours” and the “foedi colores:… quibus plerasque virginum nostrarum hodie deturpari conspicimus.” All quotations are given with page numbers from the 1620 edition of Varandal.
5. Loudon, “Diseases called chlorosis,” 32.